Nurture passion in STEM
Area14 Robotics offers 3 learning tracks for students (grade 4 -12) in the community to achieve a higher level of critical thinking, coding, and design skills through guided projects and real-life robotics missions. Club also mentors teams for regional and national competitions. Winning and participating in robotics competitions helps develop professionalism, instill self-confidence and leadership skills. However, the focus of the club goes beyond competitions through year-round programs. The goal is to develop strong foundations in STEM and create better leaders and future engineers.
Sample Session Plan
Track 1: Google CS First
CS First’s activities teach kids about computer science basics while they create cool projects with code. Students code with Scratch, a free, block-based programming tool developed by MIT. It's ideal for beginners to learn coding.
Curriculum and projects are identified to build foundation for computer science in a fun and interactive way to work individually or as a team.
Track 2: Robot Trainer
Students will use the Driving Base as a modular platform for learning the basics of building and programming autonomous robots. Each lesson introduces a new extension to be built onto the Driving Base. These extensions enable it to detect obstacles, move objects, follow lines, and turn by precise angles.
Track 3: Robot Missions
Students will work as engineers, carrying out experiments to investigate phenomena, principles, and concepts involved in physical science and technology. Working in pairs, they’ll go through a series of lessons that use hands-on experiments to explore gear ratios, friction, and gravity. The unit concludes with an open-ended challenge, which provides an opportunity for students to apply their newly acquired skills and knowledge in creative ways.
Students will integrate multiples subject skills as they analyze major global challenges, elaborate qualitative and quantitative criteria and constraints and break large problems down into smaller ones. They will also develop and use a series of test cases to verify that a solution performs according to its design specifications. Students will strengthen their communication skills as they present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically.
FLL Competition
Based on the FIRST framework, the 12 session plans are tailored so that team members of varying experiences can bring their creativity and curiosity to prepare for the competition in their own unique way. In general, plan for each session to last 90 minutes.
The team works together to create their robot and design their Innovation Project solution.